5 - Aspects of America: Democracy, Nationalism, and War

Summary

One Question that has Been Inescapable for nearly all Melville scholars is that of Melville’s relation to his country. Is Melville the ultimate American author, the writer of the “great American novel” in Moby-Dick and the American Shakespeare that he himself prophesied in “Hawthorne and his Mosses”? Or is Melville a fundamentally oppositional figure, standing outside his culture and alternately pouring scorn on its materialism and philistinism and being wounded by its indifference? Or is Melville a symptom of a sicknesses at the heart of American culture — a sign and symbol of American exceptionalism, imperialism, and arrogance? Melville the American classic, Melville the counter-cultural prophet, and Melville the American chauvinist jostle uncomfortably with each other in these readings, raising questions that will run throughout this chapter and recur in the next.

Inquiry into Melville’s “Americanness” has been marked more than most areas of Melville study by the willingness, even eagerness, of scholars who do not identify themselves primarily, or in some cases even secondarily as Melvilleans to write extensively on Melville’s work — or at the least, carefully selected portions of Melville’s work. What this has meant in practical terms is that Americanist discussions of Melville’s work have shown the pressure of the wider-ranging arguments within the disciplines of American literature and American history and the interdisciplinary enterprise of American studies into which they were incorporated. Most concretely, it has meant that rather than the full-length studies considered in the earlier chapters of this volume, scholars dealing with Melville from the vantage of American studies have tended to produce chapters devoted to Melville in the midst of longer studies, and as a result, their views of Melville tend to be shaped by larger ideological considerations regarding the shape American literature. This also means that there is perhaps a little less room for the idiosyncratic in these scholars’ work, and more of a tendency for individual scholars to arrange themselves into reasonably discrete “schools” of thought on Melville. In this chapter, I examine three angles from which Melville has been viewed as an American author and citizen: as an exemplar and critic of American literary nationalism, as an allegorist of American law and the democratic process, and as narrator and uneasy critic of war and violence in nineteenth-century America.